so i've been in ARES for about 8 months now, mostly just showing up to the monthly nets and doing the occasional SET exercise but nothing real. last weekend there was a pretty bad ice storm that knocked out power to a chunk of the county and the county emergency manager actually called us up to provide comms support at two of the warming centers they opened up.

honestly i wasnt sure what to expect. i've done all the ICS training, got my NIMS certs, been to probably 6 or 7 training nets, but there's something different about the real thing. our EC had us set up a simplex link between the two warming centers and report headcounts every hour to the EOC. nothing technically complicated but it felt like it mattered, you know?

the part that surprised me most was how much of it was just... waiting around and then suddenly needing to pass a message clearly and accurately. all that traffic handling practice on the weekly nets actually made a difference. i stumbled a little on my first message but after that it felt pretty natural.

anyway if you're in ARES and you've been on the fence about really committing to the training side of it, i'd say do it. you dont really know if any of it sunk in until you're actually deployed. curious if others had similar experiences on their first activation or if mine was pretty typical

that's pretty much exactly how my first one went, except ours was a search and rescue support thing where we were doing liaison between the ICS command post and a couple of field teams in a dead zone for their radios. same feeling though -- all that ICS tabletop stuff suddenly felt very real when the incident commander is actually looking at you waiting for information.

the waiting is real too. i remember sitting in a parking lot for like two hours with nothing to do and then suddenly needing to relay three messages back to back. staying sharp during the slow periods is honestly one of the harder skills. some guys bring a book or whatever but you still gotta be heads up.

one thing i'd add -- after your activation, did your EC do a debrief? ours does a pretty thorough after action review and that's where i feel like i learn the most. things you didnt even notice went sideways until somebody points it out.

welcome to the club haha. i remember my first activation was way less dramatic than i expected which was kind of a relief honestly. i think a lot of new people psych themselves out thinking its going to be chaos and high pressure but most of the time its pretty calm and methodical if your group has done the training right.

the traffic handling thing you mentioned is spot on. i used to think the formal message format stuff was kind of overkill for local stuff but when youre tired and its loud and someone needs a headcount passed accurately, having that muscle memory for structured message handling is genuinely useful. our group drills it pretty regularly on the Thursday night net and i used to skip those but not anymore.